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Sinclair ZX81 Cassette No 4
Reviews Summary Your Computer Issue 3 Sinclair's ZX-81 programs are neatly packaged, with smart library cards and brief but adequate instructions in tiny print. As I mentioned, there is now also a little glossy booklet with more information and some listings. Alas, I cannot back up Tim Hartnell's comment — Your Computer, June/July, page 14 — that the software is pretty too. The first problem one meets is that the Sinclair programs are not easy to load. In fact, with some, I have to report total failure. That was despite having several copies and making indomitable attempts to succeed over several weeks. There is no excuse for Sinclair, with a high-volume market in its net, to produce unreliable cassettes. One supplier has managed to provide us with perfection in this context — Sinclair does its excellent hardware a dis-service in failing us here. Secondly, the programs themselves fall on average only just on the plus side of mediocrity. There are some excellently novel ideas, and some excellent implementations, but there is plenty of poor-quality stuff on the other arm of the balance. The five cassettes so far launched cover education — 1K and 16K — games — 1K and 16K — and household — 16K. That gives a total of 28 programs for slightly less than £20. The standard Sinclair cassette price of £3.95 is certain to have a major influence on the cost of commercial ZX software. The educational material is patchy in quality. Some of the programs are novel, but as a teacher, I would not be happy to use them all with pupils. In particular, the question of educational level has received inadequate attention — but also the formatting and graphics tend to be uninspiring, so that users are likely to start to yawn very quickly. Still, some of the 16K material is definitely worthwhile. The games are not bad — as long as one has never tried Atari or watched the displays in the railway buffet. ZX-81 games can never approach the excellence of the modern dedicated video material — the machine lacks colour and sound and the programmers still need to gain considerable animation experience. If one wants to spend much time gaming with a micro, the Atari and Vic are the machines to choose, even if they are significantly more costly. Sinclair's business and household pack satisfies the company's need to offer something for the serious commercial user — even if only the very small business in the first instance. I doubt if many small businessmen will have the patience I had in trying to load this excellent-sounding software. The program promises to be so good that I spent considerably more than an hour on my three copies of the set — and I failed to load even one. Telephone gives storage of up to 50 personal records, with search allowed in seven fields. Notepad seems to be similar but the fields are user-definable. Bank Account is "a sophisticated financial-recording system with comprehensive documentation". I could not test the first part of that statement, but agree that the documentation is, for Sinclair, unusually comprehensive. It should not be long before Sinclair extends its range of software; it is no secret that more material is in the pipe-line. It is crucial, however, that the company solves the loading problem first. C+VG Issue 1 Sinclair's six-pack of games for the ZX81 owner with a 16K pack is good value for money at only £3.95. The pack, available from Sinclair Research is called, unimaginatively, Games Pack 4 and starts off with Cursor Handling which follows some of the early cursor type programs. The screen is full of numbers, with little attempt at graphics to alleviate the numerical information. The piece of paper tucked into the cassette case gives rudimentary instructions, but these are also presented at the beginning of each program on the screen (this applies to all Sinclair games). The program is fairly long, taking about 3 minutes to load. You are a pilot, you can control the throttle of your craft — keys 1 to 9, and altitude — P for clockwise, Q for anticlockwise. Height, horizontal and vertical velocity, fuel supply, throttle setting, altitude and time are displayed. The screen flashes every two seconds as the 'instrumentation' is updated. A simple graphic display shows height and horizontal position. Twenty-One is a simple pontoon-type game, but played with dice instead of cards. It is an interesting two-player game, and the randomness of the throws can create great excitement. Combat is a rather strange game. It purports to be a simple space invaders-type game, where your craft has to avoid being blown up by the alien. Unfortunately, the control keys — using A, S, Z and X — are not as obvious or easy to use as the cursor keys would be. A simple modification to the program could fix this — rather boring really. Substrike is very similar — however this time the attacker is on screen! Nobody who has so far played this game, has won! Code Breaker is a Mastermind game where you have 10 guesses to get the correct four number sequence. Finally this cassette has Mayday, which is a space rescue game. A body is adrift in a 7x7x7 matrix. You are given 10 attempts at trying to discover the position in this matrix of the body. There is also a time limit. Once you have 'cracked' the method of finding the body from the clues given, it becomes quite easy. While the games taken individually are not world beaters, this cassette is still good value and no loading problems. A number of different tape recorders were used and none gave any problems. Features Category:ZX81 Games Category:Sinclair Research Category:C+VG Reviews Category:Your Computer Reviews